Remember this moment

Three years ago I read "Making Memories Stick" in Scientific American magazine (it's available for purchase here but I found a PDF version on a professor's website.) The article, written by R. Douglas Fields, summarizes his recent research on how and when neurons know to strengthen their connections to other neurons, thus creating a memory.

Our neurons fire constantly, and far more information passes through our brains than we can consciously process. So out of all of the data coming in through our senses, and out of all of our conscious experience, how is it that some things get laid down as memories and some don't?

Memory is one of the things that I find most fascinating about the experience of being human. The mechanism that Fields described was so simple, beautiful, and elegant that I cried. And I phoned my mother to share how the wondrous nature of who we are humbles me to the point of tears.

YESTERDAY I was in my anatomy and physiology lab, and the topic for the day was the study of two types of tissue: connective tissue and nervous tissue. We watched a video with images of microscopic views of cells, including neurons, and then we looked at slides ourselves.

Watching that video, I once again found myself on the verge of tears. "There I am," I thought. That little cell, along with billions other like it, reaches out and touches its neighbors. And over time, they build up a neural network, out of which whatever it is that I am arises.

I'm not getting into the argument about whether or not there's more to me than the things I can see on a slide. I'm not discounting a soul that's somehow separate from the physical.

All that I am saying is that out of an evolutionary process too convoluted to possibly understand–triggered by chance or coaxed into motion by God–a thing of unbelievable beauty exists.

Think about that.